Aurnhammer takes BLE on a New York pub crawl

PUB CRAWL: Revellers are guided between bars by an iBeacon powered iPhone app

Digital design agency Aurnhammer is using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons placed in bars and restaurants to guide participants to their next pub crawl destination — and provide them with sponsored rewards for taking part. The first BeaconCrawl took place in New York City last week and tours are now planned for London, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Ibiza.

One hundred people took part in the first BeaconCrawl, held on 20 May, using an iBeacon-enabled iOS app that guided participants to their next destination, delivered location-specific information to attendees and rewarded them with points for each interaction. The participant with the highest number of points at the end of the pub crawl won prizes from a string of event sponsors.

“With Beaconcrawl, we’re guiding people from one venue to the next and at the start of the evening, people really don’t know what path it’s going to be,” Bill Aurnhammer, the agency’s CEO, explained to NFC World+.

“We are also adding in a little gamification to make it fun and social sharing of the event so people are rewarded in the gamification piece by doing things that are good, like meeting other Beaconcrawlers, taking photos, tweeting about it, all the things that we want to reward people for such as positive, social behaviour within the crawl.

“This was our very first event so it really started out as being a tech demo. We’re interested in the technology and we just wanted to have a fun way to show it to our friends and acquaintances and that’s where this whole concept came from.”

“They had to download the app from the app store and register through the app. Once they were registered, they were able to RSVP to the event,” Donn Gobin, Aurnhammer’s COO added. “It was a really fun evening; I think everyone really loved the concept of it.

The company is now planning on taking BeaconCrawl to other countries and cities, including London, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Ibiza. “We’re very excited,” Aurnhammer added. “We were really happy with the turnout, I think it was exactly the number we were looking for.”